An aim of modern medicine is to provide personalized or individualized treatment regimens. Those are treatment regimens which take into account a patient's individual needs or risks. Personalized or individual treatment regimens shall be even taken into account for emergency measures where it is required to decide on potential treatment regimens within short periods of time. Heart diseases are the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in the Western hemisphere. The diseases can remain asymptomatic for long periods of time. However, they may have severe consequences once an acute cardiovascular event, such as myocardial infarction, as a cause of the cardiovascular disease occurs.
In particular, cardiac necrosis is a disease or disorder of the myocardium which severely affects the function of the heart and which often results in life-threatening myocardial infarction or progression of heart failure (i.e. the so called progressive heart failure). Cardiac necrosis may have diverse causes and, therefore, may require different treatment regimens depending on the cause.
The causes of cardiac necrosis include heart failure as well as coronary heart diseases as well as cardiac myopathy. It is to be understood that as different the causes are as different are the therapies which can be applied. Specifically, in the case of heart failure a drug based therapy may appear promising while for a coronary heart disease, such as a stenosis of a coronary artery, an invasive therapy will be necessary, e.g., an angioplasty or bypass surgery (for details see Gheorghiade 2006, Circulation 114:1202-1213).
The conventional diagnostic techniques for cardiac necrosis include pivotally electrocardiographic measurements. Recently, these conventional techniques have been further strengthened by the analysis of cardiac troponin I or troponin T as biomarkers. These diagnostic techniques, however, do not allow determining the cause of a cardiac necrosis without further differential diagnosis. Thus, various different diagnostic measures have to be carried out subsequently in order to determine the cause of cardiac necrosis. However, in cases where such a time consuming diagnostic procedure is impossible or expensive, e.g., for emergency patients, a personalized treatment regimen can not be determined with sufficient accuracy. As a consequence thereof, many patients will receive a treatment regimen which is insufficient or which may have adverse side effects.
Therefore, there is a need for diagnostic or prognostic measures which allow a reliable and fast diagnosis of the cause of a cardiac necrosis in order to determine suitable treatment regimens.
The technical problem underlying the present invention can be seen as the provision of means and methods for complying with the aforementioned needs. The technical problem is solved by the embodiments characterized in the claims and herein below.